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At our startup, engineers don't build features anymore. They build APIs that internal tools like Zapier, Make and N8n can connect to. Most "features" like running an SQL query, sending a push notification when product X is ordered gets built by ops or product folks using those tools.

If you've got the idea, you build and ship it yourself. It's fast, empowering and it keeps engineers focused on building a reliable, scalable, secure set of APIs. It also forces us to write better, cleaner APIs and the APIs stay stateless and focused. Debugging can be hard and sometimes duct-tape logic quietly piles up.

I think it's better than the usual model where eng is the bottleneck for every new flow. Has anyone else tried this kind of setup? Where does it fall down or is it the new normal?

Now that Whatsapp is becoming more like a social media feed, and will proceed to progress deeper into such a pit, what will we use to communicate better?

iMessages is great for iOS, but lacks the cross platform appeal and group chat creation ease. Telegram is spammy, and I do not want to download another messaging app. I mean, how annoying is it that your friends and family didn't download that last three apps you told them were better than WhatsApp?

Throughout my career, I've received incredible kindness and inspiration from experienced people - professors, and strangers who invested time in me when I feel like I had little to offer in return. While I always express gratitude and try to pay it forward, I often feel there's still an imbalance. I feel like I owe something more direct to the specific people who shaped my life.

How do you meaningfully give back to people who helped you early on (when you literally have nothing...haha)? What forms of gratitude have you found most meaningful?

Appreciate any comments.

My experiences with coding chatbots has been underwhelming. What I would like is something that works like the following:

I write a file with comments in the file of what I expect the code to be doing at this point in the code. When I run the agent to build or compile these descriptions

it should of course provide the methods outlined, if it feels the need to create other parts of the code than what I have specified it should make comments about why it decided this and what the code it makes does.

Essentially I want an agent that allows me to approach non-literate programming in a literate programming manner/workflow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming

If you have some ideas as to how I can get to this please share, if you think it will not ever be possible to produce something like go ahead and share that too (although I think it should be)

Note I do not want an interactive bot doing stuff WHILE I type, I want an AI build step. Why? Because I type really quick without errors having worked as a data entry guy in my early 20s. The interactive bots make me slower and generally don't have good inputs most of the time.

I bet this is probably doable and a lot of you are thinking why doesn't this guy just do X or Y, but that's the thing - all I've experienced so far is the non-satisfactory interactive bots, and researching the matter the world's most popular broken search engine has been unsatisfactory, so hopefully people here can explain what to do to get what I want.

This question's for all those cool projects or skills you're secretly fascinated by, but haven't quite jumped into. Maybe you feel like you just don't have the right "brain" for it, or you're not smart enough to figure it out, or even worse, you simply have no clue how or where to even start.

The idea here is to shine a light on these hidden interests and the little (or big!) mental blocks that come with them. If you're already rocking in those specific areas – or you've been there and figured out how to get past similar hurdles – please chime in! Share some helpful resources, dish out general advice, or just give a nudge of encouragement on how to take that intimidating first step.

Let's help each other get unstuck!

For the sake of argument, assume that if your job consists of sitting at a computer, reading on a screen, and typing on a keyboard, then your career will go away.

There is always room at the top, and there may always be room for humans at the top of any career. Assume (this is a tough ask, I know) that you are NOT one of those people.

What is your fallback job? What skills do you have or would like to acquire that might keep you going? Bicycle mechanic? Teach music to children? Woodworking/carpentry? (Living off your stock options or investments does not count)

Hey I have been working on a solution to prevent secrets from committing to VCS repos, so far have prevented 10+ AWS keys from accidentally being committed. Github has an offering but it's very costly for our team. Does anyone of you want to try out ?

Companies building software in the US were hit hard a few years ago when the tax code stopped allowing deduction of software dev expenses. Now they have to be amortized over several years.

HN has had many discussions about this, including The time bomb in the tax code that's fueling mass tech layoffs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44180533 - (927 comments) a few days ago. Other threads are listed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44203869.

There's currently a major effort to get this change reversed. One of the people working on it is YC's Luther Lowe (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=itsluther). Luther has been organizing YC alumni to urge lawmakers to support this reversal. I asked him if we could do that on Hacker News too. He said yes—hence this thread :)

If you're a US taxpayer and if you agree that software dev expenses should be deductible like they used to be, please sign this letter to the relevant committee members: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1DkRGeef2e_tU2xf3TyEyd2JLlmZ....

(If you're not a US person, please don't sign the letter, since lawmakers will only listen to feedback from taxpayers and we don't want to dilute the signal.)

I'm sure not everyone here agrees with us—HN is a big community, there's no total agreement on anything—but this issue has as close to a community consensus as HN gets, so I think it makes sense to add our voices too.

Luther will be around to answer questions and hopefully HN can contribute to getting this done!

I'm managing a long-term team member who has become very difficult to manage. They appear polite, cooperative, never openly push back. They acknowledge requests, attend meetings, and respond professionally.

But in reality:

- Tasks come back half-done, again and again

- Feedback is acknowledge and then ignored

- Bugs get buried in vague responses like “works on my side”

- Messages are not replied to sometimes, or they claim “was busy, didn’t see it”

- They never say “no,” but everything gets stuck in this slow grind

They’re not openly insubordinate. Just draining.

We can’t fire them easily as they're here for over 10 years they haven’t broken any rules or gross misconduct.

But they’ve made themselves completely unreliable in the last few months.

Anyone dealt with this kind of passive resistance?

How do you actually move someone like this — or do you just sideline them and minimize the damage?

Hi all, I was wondering what books/courses/projects one might do to learn CUDA programming.

(To be frank, the main reason is a lot of companies I'd wish to work for require CUDA experience -- this shouldn't change your answers hopefully, just wanted to provide some context )

Hello HN, What do you think will lose value and what will gain value as a result of text-to-product AI?

Obviously they both offer an incredible service but competition is always good!

Well, it's been a while since I touched this theme. 6 years ago, I launched a job board trying to fight ageism in tech (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20252097)

It did super well in terms of upvotes and comments but not $ speaking (made $0)

This seems to be a current problem but what's the solution?

I want to start studying and exploring math for a hobby. I had Engineering mathematics during University days, and also enjoy discovering interesting computer science algorithms. Looking for interesting, engaging books that don't require toooo much thinking.

I’m good at routines and habits, so my baseline productivity is solid, but I often struggle to break down larger, abstract goals into clear, actionable steps. For example, goals like "get a higher-paying job with more interesting coworkers" can feel overwhelming unless I outline specific tasks like researching the job market, learning relevant skills, or setting clear milestones.

I’d like to get better at this planning skill, turning broad goals into manageable steps, and am looking for recommendations:

Practical books or articles on planning and goal-setting.

Useful frameworks or techniques you've personally tried.

Courses, coaching, or communities that focus on this skill.

If you’re working on a project with designers, devs, managers — lots of moving parts, how do you usually collect feedback?

I get that most people just drop a text or WhatsApp, or talk face-to-face. But what I’m really curious about is ad-hoc feedback on UIs.

Do on-site feedback widgets actually work? Would you use one if it let you leave powerful, contextual feedback right where it matters?

Would love to hear from anyone who’s dealt with this.

Given the recent WWDC announcement of Apple’s Liquid Glass design language and the subsequent discussion on their functional usefulness in conveying visual hierarchy of affordances, I’m wondering if some lessons could also be taken from an environment that had evolved in parallel -- that of video game interfaces, whose trend initially started out being a vehicle to facilitate immersion via stylized decorations (see: Warcraft and StarCraft), then underwent a phase of minimalism (reflector sight-esq monochromatic HUD overlays) before finally settling on something that is a mixture of stylized and functional thanks to a design pressure of needing to convey glanceable information during fast-paced gameplay without getting in the way.

For a specific case study I’d like to ask what HN thinks of the UI design language of Minecraft, specifically the semi-3D button and slider looks motivated by a need to convey visual hierarchy given a constrained pixel-art granularity budget.

It utilizes different shades of grey borders to convey a sort of faux surface-normal highlight on beveled edges to indicate whether the element is raised or sunken.

I think this is an interesting innovation of min-maxing the visual complexity budget, perhaps the modern beveled-glass design language could draw some inspirations from here?

Lately it seems like we're drowning in a tidal wave of new products, all expecting $10+ a month as subs. Is this really sustainable in the long run? Or am I missing something?

I was reading this recently shared post on the promise of CAR-T therapy for cancer[1]. However, it seems that it may not be universally applicable to all cancers[2], including breast cancer.

What have we discovered (and made available as treatment) for advanced breast cancers?

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44219379 [2]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8990477/

I've always worked with text, but I only started digging deep into understanding Unicode this year.

What do HN people have to say about Unicode and UTF-{8,16,32}? Are there parts you've never really understood? Have you had unexpected bugs due to misunderstood properties of text?

At a glance, most developer conferences seem focused on boasting about minutiae and implementation details ("I've done X", "Lessons learned from fixing Z", and so on). While those are fun to attend and are indeed relevant to a stack, framework, platform, or language, they often restrict the human side of software development to fun marginalia.

Do you know of a developer conference that covers key skills such as communication, teamwork, and personal growth, even as the main track? Or those are all considered to be orthogonal to shipping code and thus less valuable, important, or interesting?

I'm doing this part time work with another "senior/staff" developer who got tired of writing lots of code with nodejs and decided the way to go was doubling down on aws - and the various tools provided. His new stack is as follows

- dynamodb - nodejs lambda functions - s3 - cdk to setup infra, attach lambda's to various resources

nearly all our features rely on the following "common/reuseable" existing code. This is thoroughly tested because they are reused in multiple projects. -> we have a core set of infra/lambda code that does common things like -> authorization/authentication/accounts - using auth0 behind the scenes - for user management -> billing - using a stripe setup. we have ddb table, webhooks and various lambda to support billing based on accounts above -> managing uploads - presigned and direct multipart/form-data uploads and saving metadata in dd -> creating and tracking jobs - via sqs -> have api as a service module that helps us track useage for api's being sold to public

For a typical project, we spin up the above existing infra Add custom infrastructure to do things specific to the project This typically involves -> adding an api gateway and attaching lambda handlers -> and so on.

My question is Which of you do something similar How do you organize reuseable code - do you create your own custom constructs library? Do you have one giant gateway that custom apis get attached to or you create new gateways to do whatever.

This struck me as an interesting sci-fi writing exercise. Gas stations are everywhere; but they'll likely change considerably going forward.

Imagine visiting a gas station in 2040:

• will it sell gas?

• what convenience items will it sell?

• who, if anyone, will staff it?

• what payment methods will it accept?

• what signage and decor will it use?

• will it offer new services?

Interesting to understand how you use it in real life scenarios.

I use it mainly to research the web, research competitors.

I used it for JTBD to explain the step-by-step process of our client's business flow (I am a b2b PM). Then, I checked with the colegue that worked with such clients for 10 years and got only two edis from her.

And the last thing I use Cursor with our GitHub repo to make SQL queries to our DB, and just exploring the already made logic (because we don't have any documentation, the only way to understand the parts we made is to ask Claude)

What about you? How do you use LLM's day to day?

RPA helped with task-level automation, but today’s enterprise processes demand more than macros and scripts. We’re seeing the rise of AI agents—context-aware, multi-system, and even collaborative. Curious how others are seeing this shift from automation to orchestration. Thoughts?

Firebase appears to be down for production services. Firebase console shows errors for existing projects.

Hi everyone,

I'm an undergraduate student with a passion for compilers and low-level systems. Recently, I built *Py2C*, a minimalistic Python 3.10-to-C transpiler, and just finished writing a paper about it that I'd like to submit to arXiv (category: `cs.PL`).

- Written in Go, it parses Python using `ast`, serializes to JSON, and emits compilable C - Supports type inference, class-to-struct conversion, method lowering, control flow - Fully self-contained, with no external dependencies — tested on M1 Mac with `gcc` - Code: https://github.com/lixiasky/Py2c

I'm now looking for *someone who has published in `cs.PL`* to kindly endorse me on arXiv, so I can submit this work.

If you're willing to help, arXiv provides this endorsement link:

https://arxiv.org/auth/endorse?x=UK6GBG or go to https://arxiv.org/auth/endorse.php and enter the code: `UK6GBG`

I’d be truly grateful. This is my first compiler project and first paper submission attempt. I’m happy to answer questions or clarify anything.

Thank you for your time Email: lixiasky@protonmail.com